A colleague of mine gave up in the middle of obtaining a building permit—two months of dashing from one bureau to another, greasing palms of faceless bureaucrats, his meager building budget disappearing in unofficial “processing fees.” It is no longer about compliance; it is an intentional obstruction disguised as bureaucracy and corruption. Something intended to facilitate public safety has become a racket.
Obtaining a building permit in the Philippines today is a chore and an outrageously costly affair for the common man. And it is not that Filipinos do not like to obey rules. Contractors naturally want to oblige, but obtaining the permit is penal. There are too many steps, too redundant forms, too numerous signatory officials of unremunerative titles, and too vague “requirements” that surprise one midway. Not only is the system convoluted—it is set up to remain so. It either compels applicants to give up in despair or shell out money to traverse the bog.
Every office one has to navigate is a gatekeeper of some description—engineers, inspectors, administrative clerks, appraisers, zoning regulators—all of them with the pen capable of making the papers advance or relegating them to the back of a new stack. And beneath the mountain of paper, on-the-fly transactions are being constructed. They’re not openly discussed, but everyone understands them. One needs to “speak to a person” to get unstuck, to have the paper “accelerated,” or, worse, to prevent it from getting “lost.” It’s an economy that depends on dysfunction, and every participant in the system has conditioned themselves to make it like it’s normal.
More derogatory in the situation, though, is how that burden falls disproportionately on the small builders—the ones building small houses or stores in barangays and smaller towns. They are not tycoons looking for loopholes; they are ordinary folks who dream of having a respectable home to live in or earn a living. But they get to face the same difficult gauntlet fairly, because they have no contacts and influence to overcome red tape. Others have to go to the extent of building illegally, demolition or fines pending against them, simply because the other is going to be drained dry by an inefficiency-starved system.
Discussions with engineers and contractors exhibit a dismal trend: everybody almost knows the system is flawed, but nobody quite expects it to change. They complain about how the local building authority demands “gas money” to make site visits or weeks for one signature unless one “helps along the way.”. The Local Government Code can enact the principles of transparency and simplification, yet discretion and delay prove stronger than law. It is not a matter of plain dysfunction but of rot, whereby governance progressively declines to extortion.
The thing is bad in the sense that the issue has become so ordinary that folks don’t get upset about it anymore. It’s something we’ve come to factor into our budgets. The same way you budget dollars for gravel and cement, you budget dollars for “extra fees.” What was once a sporadic practice of dishonesty has become institutionalized. Folks don’t say, “Why is this?” anymore. They say, “How much is it going to cost to make it happen?”
But when people are pushed to the margins in such a manner, when conformity is rewarded rather than punished, the public loses trust. If the rules are maintained for the weak alone, and the enforcers of those rules are the same individuals undermining them, how can society ever advance? Roads, however magnificent, cannot be built on the substrate of cynicism. Licenses must protect people, not trap them in destitution or drive them into illegality.
It all starts with political will, from the local officials to the clerks who work with the folders. There must be computerization, deadlines, fee disclosure, and an anonymous reporting system. It should not take a miracle to construct a house under the law in this nation. A permit system safeguarding human life should never be allowed to steal people’s dignity.
